When you need votes, you make silly mandates so you can say "look what I did".

When you make silly mandates, big companies and engineers go nuts.

When big companies and engineers go nuts, they design really cool things no one wants or could afford if they did want it.

Don't design really cool things no one wants or could afford if they did want it,...

...give money (significantly less than companies/engineers would spend) to engineering programs at universities and let them develop partial or complete solutions toward an end goal. Let them figure out what's feasible before jumping off the cliff.

It's all a game... the whole "Sport Utility Vehicle" was a thinly veiled disguise to put everything on a truck chassis... hence excluding it from regulations... then you market an ever-more obese consumer market with the notion that driving to the supermarket is a Sporting adventure deserving a Sport Utility Vehicle... problematic regulation skirted.

Off topic, but someone needs a clue... Romney says he will lower taxes for all, but it's a lie, because it is not possible to do so without crushing the economy. If you believe that Romney will lower your taxes, you are fooling yourself. Also, misinformed person, (Bunter) Obama is not raising taxes on any households making less than 250,000/yr, the Heath Reform plan (not Obamacare) will not affect EVERYBODY as those who only listen to FOX believe, and even though our conservative biased Supreme Court ruled it as a tax legally, it is not a tax, or it would affect everyone. If you already have health insurance, it does not affect you. Funny how the conservatives cry about how poor people are putting a drain on society, yet a bill that helps to insure that the uninsured get insured is bad? The Republican party is playing a game that is contradictory. The real opposition to the Health Care Reform bill, is that they call it Obama care, and we know that Republican politicians oppose EVERYTHING Obama does, period, whether it makes sense or not (they say this publicly... so don't deny it). It is this kind of irresponsible governing that has eroded any respect I have for the Republican party. The conservative way of doing politics didn't work with Bush, it backfired horribly and left the country in a lurch. Are we ready to let Mitt come in with the same idea and screw it up worse?

Every time the federal government gets involved we lose. I just got the news that, even though my health is very good, under the new Obamacare rules, my health insurance rate will double next year which will cost me more than my morgage and provide way less coverage and will have higher deductibles. The smart move is to drop the coverage and just pay the penalty so I can support the freeloaders. Besides that, who wants to live a long time in a communist country anyway?

The cars will go the same way. They'll make it mandatory to drive these unsafe tiny vehicles that will be priced tripple what something sensible would cost. Truck licensing will require a "justification" that must be approved by a politically motivated committee of liberal pinheads.

There is a lot of useful engine technology out there that has been rejected out of hand by our bureaucratic industrial system. No one wants to stick their neck out again and commit another "Wankel". But, maybe now there will be money available to get a little bolder.

I agree, instead of spending millions fighting the regulations, companies should have long ago spent the money to improve their products to a point to where no regulations are needed.

Why would the automotive press want to discuss mediocrity? I'm not even sure the writers have enough creative writing skills to make eco cars sound interesting.

Also, the writers seem like they are in over their heads when they start talking actual technology. The advances in hybrids and EVs almost require some basic engineering knowledge to be discussed intelligently. It could also be that they feel the average reader wouldn't understand the complexities.

Performance is what has always been heralded. It is what people understand and want (US anyway). But people have to temper their desires based on practical reasons like purchase price and operational costs. If Detroit were to come out with a muscle car or 3/4 ton truck that got 40+ mpg and sold for around the $20K price point, they would not be able to make them fast enough.

To think - I wasted all those years in school, work, and all that time on research projects to devolop new things; when all I had to do was mandate new technology. I could have saved countless dollars, blood, sweat, and tears.

Why didn't they just teach this in school?

Oh wait - I went to the college of engineering. If I had dropped 80 IQ points and hung across campus with the humanities/Poly Sci losers; I would have know.

This is the same kind of "if we mandate it, it will come" thinking that led GM to pour millions into the EV1 in the 1990's, in response to the CA Air Resources Board mandate for fleet percentages of zero-emission vehicles ... while all but ignoring the more practical but non-ZEV hybrid approach.

The end result: Toyota takes the hybrid market, GM ends up giving away glorified golf carts to meet what's left of that mandate.

Ideology and wishful thinking does not trump physics and economics ... but it does create incentives to create politically-correct black holes into which the attention and resources of innovators are drawn ... at the expense of innovation that DOES respect physics and economics, and would actually produce solutions that will work over the long term.

Thank you , Bunter...... I was starting to get depressed again with the last few moronic , cliche'-ridden posts. The best start to truly solving this massive and profound problem, will begin about 70 days from now.

No one would argue against having goals to improve the efficiency and MPG of motor vehicles. However, they must be realistic and achievable; what I see from this gang of leftists, statists, and big government nannies is an arrogance that ignores reality and seeks to control every aspect of life. That aside, the forcing of technology, which is largely what we see at work I believe results in diverting resources away from other more practical efforts, and focuses on technologies that are simply "not yet ready for prime-time"... (e.g. the Chevy Volt).

The title of the post "still not good enough" , really does say it all. For the leftist/socialist nitwits, it will NEVER BE ENOUGH.... no matter whether it is MPG goals, or raising your taxes. What I say is "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH".

A few weeks ago, Ford Motor Co. quietly announced that it was rolling out a new wrinkle to the powerful safety feature called stability control, adding even more lifesaving potential to a technology that has already been very successful.

It won't be too much longer and hardware design, as we used to know it, will be remembered alongside the slide rule and the Karnaugh map. You will need to move beyond those familiar bits and bytes into the new world of software centric design.

People who want to take advantage of solar energy in their homes no longer need to install a bolt-on solar-panel system atop their houses -- they can integrate solar-energy-harvesting shingles directing into an existing or new roof instead.

Focus on Fundamentals consists of 45-minute on-line classes that cover a host of technologies. You learn without leaving the comfort of your desk. All classes are taught by subject-matter experts and all are archived. So if you can't attend live, attend at your convenience.